How long had she been fighting? How long since the first wave of demon attacks. If someone had told Valerie that it had been just over nine minutes, she would have refused to believe it. Time had slowed and stretched for her and every fighting Marine. As far as Major Winston was concerned, they had been fighting for hours! And what was with the tether? Why was she hanging from it almost upside down?
The tether was attached at the hip of the suit, forcing the heavier upper body to hang upside down. It forced her to twist her body in order to keep her head in a relative horizontal position and prevent blood rushing to her head. Where were the demons? Why had their continuous onslaught stopped? The demons were this close to wiping off the Marines, why had they stopped?
It took a few more moments for her brain to clear enough to realize that the problem was not with her tether. It was simply following the laws of physics. The place they had been floating around now suddenly had gravity! Something had changed. For a moment she thought that the ship had started rotating faster. Then she realized that if she had learnt her high school physics correctly, it wasn’t possible to create gravity at the central axis of a ship however fast it might rotate.
Something else had changed! It was only possible for her to be experiencing gravity at the central axis if the ship was moving! It took another few moments for that fact to sink in. The Goliath demon ship was accelerating in some direction. It was impossible for her to say which direction, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t be a good omen.
As Valerie looked around with a clearer mind for the first time, she was confronted with the strange sight of a forest of tethers! There were well over two hundred Marines hanging from their tethers upside down. Most of them dead! Some with such grisly injuries that it was beyond description. Many of the hanging Marine bodies were decapitated. A few of the living Marines had recovered enough to grab hold of their tether and try to climb back towards the hatch. Through that forest of tethers and around it, Valerie surveyed the scene. Looking out for demons. She saw them. Many of them in mortal struggles of their own!
She realized where all the demons had gone, and why their onslaught had stopped. The demons weren’t tethered. Valerie hadn’t seen any of the demon suits having a tether. The demons had used the jet of their suits to maneuver themselves when they jumped into the void. The jets of the demon suits were powerful. They were powerful enough for them to maneuver well in a zero G fight, but they weren’t designed to fly in gravity. Not the current gravity, which by Valerie’s reckoning would be about eighty percent of Earth’s gravity.
When the Goliath ship jerked into motion, and the gravity kicked in at the axis of the ship, the Marines fell and hung in their current position. Most of the demons fighting in midair fell. Valerie saw some of the demons being able to make it back to the wire mesh sheath with the full boost of their jets. Those were the luckier ones, the demons who had been close to the tube when the gravity turned on. Most of the demons didn’t make it. They struggled with their jets but simply kept falling down the void on to the surface below. A few of the demons had managed to latch on to the tethers of the Marines in the forest of tethers. The demons didn’t have the anatomy to be able climb a tether, but they could hold on to it for their dear life!
Ever the soldier, the first thought that came to Maj. Winston’s mind was that it should be easy to kill those demons hanging on to the tether. Just grab those forelimbs with a cattle prod, and the demon would be forced to let go! Just as she was plotting a way to execute her plan, another surprise! The gravity turned off!
That wasn’t the end of the surprise though. Along with the gravity, the lights also turned off! The massive compartment was plunged into darkness! Before Valerie could move a muscle though, the central axis tube and the light shaft that ran down the middle of that axis tube, which had been providing the lighting till that moment started to glow again. The glow was however extremely faint. Over an order of magnitude faint compared to what it had been previously. Valerie could look directly at the light shaft. Its brightness was about as much as looking at a candle flame. Valerie could make out the forest of tethers around her as dark silhouette.
She could no longer see faces or colors, only dark shapes. How she wished she had taken that infrared eye enhancement that so many of her fellow Marines had opted for. She bet that the light was glowing a lot brighter in the infrared. The demons had their vision spectrum shifted towards the red end of the spectrum compared to humans. They saw fairly well in the infrared. She knew that from her briefings. From a human perspective, if the earlier lighting had been about as much as late evening, the current lighting was like being in twilight.
Maj. Winston didn’t know what was happening to the Goliath demon ship. She didn’t know whether whatever was happening to the ship was good or bad for the Marines in the long term. What she sensed was that the immediate situation for the Marines had turned a lot more dangerous than it was before. Gravity had turned off again, so the demons could resume their onslaught. Now however, the lights had turned off. The demons could see just fine, but the humans couldn’t. They would have to literally fight blind!
Sure enough, the demons that had been hanging on to human tethers activated their jets once more and let themselves loose on the disoriented Marines. The demons on the central axis tube were clearly discernible as black shadows as they blocked the dim light of the central axis tube. Maj. Winston saw them jump off the axis tube again! The demons meant business. They were returning to finish the job!
“Marines regroup! Back to the hatch! Defend the hatch. Fight! Fight like there is no tomorrow!” Maj. Winston shouted, as she herself pulled hard on her tether to rise back towards the hatch in the zero G environment. Depressingly few of the Marines heeded her call and followed her. She knew the rest were dead or dying.
She slipped into the routine of fighting the demons in zero G, as if she had been doing it all her life, a part of her mind wandered in other places. She thought about her life, her loves and relationships. One part of her mind was satisfied because a morbid curiosity of hers had been finally satiated. Valerie had always had a morbid obsession of trying to guess how she would die. Now she finally knew!
Strangely, that knowledge gave her peace of mind and calm like she had never experienced before. That stillness of mind, slowed time for her, let her see her adversary’s moves a lot more clearly even in the darkness. The calm helped her kill more efficiently, and kill is what she did – single mindedly. She knew that it was only a matter of time before a blade pierced her body or cut off her neck, but until that happened she would just keep killing. She was in a trance, and life had become very simple for her.
That trance was broken by the loud bang of a high velocity recoilless rifle going off at close range. Valerie was startled, but far less than the demon she was fighting. She took the opening presented to her by her quarry and plunged her sword deep at the base of the demon’s pseudo neck where it attached to and emerged from the hard shell of its body. She twisted the blade with all her enhanced strength trying to maximize the damage before the demon pulled away startled and panicked. The wound wouldn’t kill the demon, but would debilitate it for sure, making it easier to kill.
Valerie didn’t have to bother any further with the demon though. Two more high velocity rounds struck the demon, imparting it a kicking momentum backwards and away from Valerie. She was not completely out of her trance though. Valerie could not yet fully comprehend what was happening around her. The sound of that weapon sounded awfully familiar, yet it took her a few more moments to realize what she was seeing.
She saw the silhouette of fully suited Marines with their helmets on, unlike herself and the Marines who had been fighting with her. More importantly, they were fully armed, and were coming out of the breach with their guns blazing! Like the demons, these newly arrived Marines weren’t tethered. They were using their suit thrusters to maneuver in the void. Given her recent experience and having seen the fate of untethered demo
ns, she didn’t consider it a very smart move. Still, she couldn’t have described her joy and relief. What the hell had happened? How did these Marines get through with all their equipment functioning?
Before Valerie could get an answer to that question, she couldn’t help noticing the speed at which the Marines were pouring into the second compartment through the connecting radiation filled tube. It was a continuous stream, and the rate of ingress was so rapid that the central axis tube was filling up with Marines creating a choke point at the breach, from where the Marines exited the tube to join the fight.
How were they getting through so fast through the radiation filled connecting tube? The radiation filled tube! It must no longer be filled with radiation! Now that she thought about it, she could no longer see the bright red-orange glow of the radiation tube. She knew the connecting tube was there, she had come through it and had almost died in the process, but she could no longer see it.
“Who is the CO out here? Who is the CO out here?” Maj. Winston could faintly hear someone shout. Valerie reluctantly tore her gaze away from an approaching demon to turn towards the direction of the sound. There were two newly arrived Marines who were on intercept course with that demon, and they were better armed and armored to tackle the threat than she was. Still, it took some effort to tear away her attention from the ensuing fight. She wanted to see how it went, she wanted to help.
When she located the source of the voice, it was another Marine floating close to the breach. This was the only newly arrived Marine, who had removed his helmet, probably to be able to shout out to the surviving Marines who didn’t have functioning suits and hence no functioning radio. His helmet was secured with a short cord to his suit at the hip, but what stood out was the Marine’s posture. The Marine had bent his body in a strange sort of a way. From battle experience, Valerie knew that a Marine would do that only if he was trying to minimize pain. This meant that this Marine was injured. How did this Marine get injured so fast? The newly arrived Marines had hardly started fighting? This Marine must have been injured before, probably in the fighting on the outer surface of the Goliath ship.
“Over here! Major Winston here! I am the Commanding Officer here.” Valerie shouted. She was surprised at her own voice. It was a croak rather than a shout, but with her arms waving, she managed to get the attention of the Marine. “I am tethered and without power. You will have to come to me.” She added with as loud a voice as she could muster.
It was so dark that even when the Marine had come face to face with Valerie, she couldn’t see his face. With a functional suit, she could have tagged the id of every Marine even in the dark, now though she had to ask for ID the old-fashioned way. She was about to demand the Marine to identify himself, but the Marine spoke before that. “Lt. Col. Jiǎng, just in case you can’t see my face, because I for sure can’t see a thing without the helmet. How the hell have you guys been fighting?!”
“It was a lot brighter sir. It just got dark a few moments ago… and you are right sir, I can’t see a thing either. The guys with owl enhancements would have probably fared better, but the rest of us would have been slaughtered in this darkness.” Valerie replied. ‘Owl enhancement’ was the slang e-Marines used for those of them who had opted for infrared sensitivity grafts on their retina like Pvt. Sha’ad.
“Where is Lt. Col. Ngwambe?” Chichi asked the question that was burning in his mind. He was desperate to locate his friend.
“I don’t think he is coming back… I mean out… I mean, it’s a long story. He left me in charge sir. He did the bravest thing sir! I mean, I could have never done what he did, sir.” Valerie’s voice tapered and choked.
Chichi was holding on to Maj. Winston’s tether to steady himself with one hand. He placed his other hand on Valerie’s shoulders and said softly. “The seventh battalion needs to retreat and recuperate. The fifth battalion will take over. First though, you must debrief me. Here, let me untether you and guide you to the breach. We will talk inside the tube.” With that the CO of the fifth battalion of the Beta Brigade took over the fight in the second compartment from his friend Desmond, the CO of the seventh battalion.
Even before they could move, Maj. Winston let Chichi know why it was critical that the Marines fought with their backs to sphere, and not let the demon take that position. Chichi didn’t have to move about and shout. His battalion had fully functional suits. He gave instructions, worked out virtual perimeters in three dimensions, which all the other suited Marines could see on their helmet screens, and he told them to hold the hatch of the sphere at all costs till he was debriefed and formulated an attack plan of his own.
Once inside the tube, Maj. Winston tried to recall as much of the important details as she could. Her training helped in quickly conveying tactical information, although she couldn’t help being overcome with emotions a few times during the narration. When she had finished, she asked Chichi an expectant question in a tone a child would use to ask an adult. “What are our chances colonel?”
To her surprise, Chichi answered in an upbeat tone. “Chances Major? If you are asking about the chances of achieving the primary objective of our mission, then I would say they are very bright indeed! As we speak I can see on my screen that the third mule is entering through the connecting tube passage. We have three nukes inside this compartment and if driven to desperation can blow up and reduce this compartment to nuclear ashes at any time. I am fairly certain that would disable this Goliath ship permanently if not kill it outright.
“That is our primary mission. In fact, your battalion has managed to do one better! We cannot be certain yet, and I have sent word out to the ships to scan and probe, but it seems that your battalion has managed to disable the main power source of this ship without having to destroy it completely! It opens possibilities that we didn’t dare imagine when we embarked on this mission – the possibility to take this ship reasonably intact and learn its advanced technologies! You see Major, we are aiming higher now. I have already talked to the Admiral, he is only five light minutes away now. He fully endorses our increased ambition.
“The Sapporo and the Hammer have confirmed something we had suspected when the gravity suddenly turned up at the axis of this Goliath ship. This ship made a sudden and unexpected acceleration for some time before it stopped again. What is interesting about the sudden movement of the ship is that the ship didn’t move to break orbit, which is what one would have expected of this ship once it knew it was under attack.
“The Sapporo and the Hammer have lit up their plasma engines a long time ago, so the demons know more ships are coming. Instead, according to the trajectory analysis done by the Sapporo, this ship plunged further towards Earth dangerously lowering its orbit, which if hadn’t been stopped when it was, would have plunged this Goliath on to the atmosphere of Earth. All indications are that this was an uncontrolled plunge. It is possible Major that you guys not just disabled their power source, but also in some way screwed up their propulsion system! If that is the case, this ship is truly disabled, and ripe to be taken over.
“It is not going to be easy, and it going to be bloody. It will ask for tremendous sacrifice from us Marines, as your battalion already has experienced firsthand… but hey, we are playing to win now! We are no longer playing defense! For the first time in our encounter with the demons, we are playing offence!” Chichi finished his optimistic assessment, paused as if reading something on his screen and then added… “As if to confirm the drive disablement hypothesis, I have just been relayed information by the Sapporo that the Goliath ship is using relatively puny for its size ion thrusters to stabilize its new orbit around Earth. It is almost like a USC destroyer vessel using its docking thrusters to stabilize its orbit. It doesn’t prove that their main propulsion system is disabled, but what else could it be?” Chichi was all smiles and spread his hands with flourish to finish his upbeat assessment.
Chichi had also taken the time speaking to Maj. Winston to replay the events in his m
ind and formulate a tactical plan to hold their position for the next few hours. Sapporo and the Hammer would be sending reinforcements soon. He had to hold on till then. What would be the best tactical plan? Should he try to hole up here at the central axis, embedding the Marines like a tick which the demons can’t dislodge? Or should he descend towards the surface, find a less exposed battle ground and fight from there? Both the strategies had their downsides.
The central axis tube was out in the open and exposed from all sides. It was a hard to approach place, but completely indefensible once the demons managed to reach it. On top of that there was no hardened cover behind which the Marines could take shelter. Their current shelter was a transparent tube made from flimsy material to transmit light! It was like taking cover against bullet fire behind glass doors! It was a wonder that the demons hadn’t blown up the central axis tube yet. The demons might yet do it.
According to Maj. Winston, the Marines had been discovered and the alarm raised a little over fifteen minutes ago. Already he had reports of drones hovering around them. They seemed to be surveillance drones, none had fired on the Marines. It was more likely that these were survey and maintenance drones run by the engineers who maintained this ship that were being used as observation platforms.
It was unlikely that the demons had armed and armored fighter drones inside their own ship. Such a need would have never been anticipated by even the craziest of the demon planners. Given enough time, the demons would come to the logical conclusion of blowing up the central axis tube and finishing the Marines off cheaply in one stroke. Maybe the demons were figuring out the best way to do it without causing too much collateral damage. Such a contingency was unlikely to be listed in their manual of procedures, so they must be figuring a way out. The central axis tube was a precarious and vulnerable place for the Marines, they needed to find a more secure location.
On the other hand, trying to go down had its own innumerable perils. The only way Chichi could think of going down would be to rappel down lines. Parachuting down would have been a good idea, but they didn’t have any! A Marine rappelling down the line initially in low gravity would be a sitting duck to be shot down by the demons with their needle guns. Even if some of the Marines managed to reach below to the buildings that towered high above the surface below, what then? What would the Marines have achieved?
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 33